One of the things I like about good music writing is, somewhat surprisingly, something it has in common with good sports writing: you don't have to be a fan of the subject matter to enjoy it. For the most part, I don't care for country music. I like Johnny Cash, two or three bluegrass acts, and a handful of early country performers who would just as easily be classified as "roots" or even blues musicians (Tosches takes a few not-very-convincing steps towards explaining this in Country, but the truth is that for a long time the only significant difference between country and blues was the race of the performer), but for the most part it's not a genre I connect with. I did, however, get a lot of satisfaction out of reading Country.

Country covers, or claims to cover, the darker, stranger bits of country music's history, but given that it was first published in 1977 and social norms have shifted a fair bit since then, a lot of what would have been strange and shocking at the time of the book's release now seems rather tame. Tosches has a gift for presenting the personalities of early country music (some big, some obscure) without judgement—or without much judgment, anyway—looking at them mostly in terms of their role in the development of the music and the industry. That Emmett Miller (one of the most obscure, but also most important musicians in the genre, even if only for the profound influence he wound up having on Hank Williams) built his career around minstrelsy isn't used by Tosches to diminish the quality of his songs (some of which are quite good) or the impact he had, as might be done if the book were written today. Instead Tosches is straightforward about it; yes it was racist, yes that means it's morally objectionable and we can't condone it, but it was a real thing that real people did, and it can't be ignored, so let's take a serious look at its place in country music history that can acknowledge the moral difficulties without everything being about those difficulties. It's a fine line to walk, but Tosches manages it. In fact, there is an entire chapter about the history and development of minstrelsy in country music (an interesting fact, that Tosches backs up with an impressive run-through of artists and their work, is that it was more popular in the north than the south, and most of the performers were themselves northerners) that pulls no punches when it comes to some of the racism that was a part of the scene at the time. (Tosches doesn't get much into contemporary music, so there's no examination of race issues in late '70s country; he does, however, add in the preface that he initially didn't want to write that chapter, but in hindsight sees it as one of the strongest and most important parts of the book.)

A special bit of fun for people like me is when Tosches traces the origins of a song, or a playing style, right back to the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century (or in one memorable case, right back to Ancient Greece). It turns out—and this surprised me, though it makes sense in retrospect—that the slide/steel guitar technique originated in 19^th Century Hawaii.

Tosches has a tremendous gift for metaphor, which is all that much better because he likes to keep them simple, and the level or research and scholarship that went into Country is astonishing (even just the work done on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sun Records). I would have a hard time tracking down most of that information in this day and age, with access to the Internet and my superior Google kung-fu; I can't imagine having to do it in a time before the widespread use of cassette tapes and FAX machines. (I did find myself struggling a couple of times to fight against the atemporal view of pop culture encouraged by my heavy Internet usage; Tosches shows a fair bit of disdain for Johnny Cash in the book, but I had to remind myself that it was written at a time when Cash had for years been producing the worst work of his career, and he had yet to begin the genre-defying American Recordings series that would reinvigorate his work and cement his reputation as one of popular music's most powerful and respected artists.) Even if I hadn't loved the book I would have walked away with an enormous list of roots musicians and recordings to investigate.

I stumbled across Country because of a Twitter conversation I had quite a few months ago with William Gibson. We were discussing blues, and the country-rock group Drive-By Truckers, and I mentioned how it didn't strike me as his kind of music. He told me that, growing up in the South as he did, it was hard not to have a certain kind of relationship to it, and recommended I track down a copy of Country. It took forever—the Toronto Public Library only has a single reference copy—but was well worth the wait. It's some of the best music writing I've ever read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in music of any kind, whether you're a country fan or not.

Appropriately titled, the common denominator across nearly all of the stories in Toronto-based author Derek Hayes' first collection is a character who is so wrapped up in themselves, has internalized their neuroses to such a degree, that they have become unable to see the reality of their position in the world and the truth of their relationships to others. Many are merely oblivious (see Steven W. Beattie's recent blog post on "Green Jerseys" for an excellent in-depth look at a particular example), while others have deeper issues. Anxiety is a constant companion to nearly all of Hayes' characters.

In "Maybe You Should Get Back There," Max lives with his girlfriend Nadia, and Chris, an old friend from school, and can't stop imagining that they are having, or want to have, an affair. He obsesses over the dynamics of their relationship, giving undue weight to casual conversations and comments, leading to circular reasoning and a trap of jealousy and paranoia that should look familiar to anyone with trust issues (whether their source is from a real betrayal, or something more internal). As the reader becomes more invested in Max's voice, he stops coming off as quite so unreasonable, and one starts to wonder—what if there really is something going on between Nadia and Chris? We're snapped out of it when Max takes significant action on little more than suspicion, but by then we've gone through a whole spectrum of emotions with him, and the story takes on extra shades of complexity. It's no longer just about Max's jealousy and selfishness, and the isolation they cause, but also about his inability to address his fears directly, and Chris and Nadia's complete unawareness of his deteriorating emotional state.

Some of the pieces in The Maladjusted are not so sophisticated; "Inertia" feels like something I've read a dozen times before, ripped straight from the CanLit Book of Themes for Urban Writers, while "A Feel For America," seems disjointed and unfinished.

I'm going to agree with Steven in his National Post review and say that the end of "That's Very Observant of You," one of my favourite stories in the collection, is unconvincing, but otherwise it's an astounding exploration of how anxiety can be crippling, not through big events and responsibilities, but rather the minutiae of daily life, and how liberating that can make small achievements feel. Despite the two stories being entirely different, I couldn't help but link it in my mind to Rebecca Rosenblum's wonderful "Route 99," from her debut collection, Once.

If I had one complaint about the book as a whole, it's that there were times I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. Hayes is so invested in his core themes of alienation and disorder that there is often little room for anything else, and by the end of the sixteenth story, I was definitely ready to see something else from him.

Full disclosure: I was the copyeditor for the cover art of Soon This Will All Be Gone, but I had no involvement with the music; indeed, I haven't even met the band in person.

I went to see catl with a friend of mine a little over a year ago. I had just heard With the Lord For Cowards You Will Find No Place, and events had arranged themselves so that they were doing a show at the Horseshoe at a time when I actually had the money to go. We sat through a couple of warm-up acts, one band so forgettable I can't even remember what kind of music they played, and another a slightly better than average dad-rock band, the sort of unit you expect Jim Belushi to front on his off days. Our conversation was not interrupted.

And then it was catl's turn.

I've been to some pretty epic live shows, from big stadium acts like the Rolling Stones, to tiny indie bands that tore up the joint but never managed to put out an album. I once reckoned that the best show I'd ever been to, as hard as it might be to believe, was Econoline Crush on the B-stage at Edgefest '97 in Winnipeg. They were a mediocre studio band at best, but their live act was a thing unto itself, alive, and a little bit on fire. I got kicked in the face twice during their set, and was nearly concussed as crowd-surfing filmmaker (and old friend) Karl Richter slammed into the back of my head. It was a throbbing mass of flesh and blood and noise. It was glorious, and far and away the best thing I'd ever seen on stage. Until I saw catl.

I didn't know it was possible to fill a space with that much sound, especially not from such tiny amps on such a tiny stage. It was like a fluid, swirling up from below, getting not just in your ears, but in your eyes and mouth and nose and down into your lungs, getting at your soul through capillaries as yet undiscovered by science.

Jamie Fleming was sitting up there with his guitar, rocking back and forth and nodding along with the rhythm, as righteous a shouter as any Toronto has ever produced. When my friend saw Sarah K. shaking at the keys like some sexy rock 'n' roll faith healer, little smoky jets of light erupting like fireworks from her sequined dress, she turned to me and said, I want to BE her. Johnny LaRue was somewhere in the back, steady-rolling and inscrutable. It was raw and dangerous and beautiful.

So that's their live show. What about this new album, Soon This Will All Be Gone?

The intro and outro (oh, how I miss the word "coda") are scratchy, tinny covers of the great Furry Lewis and Lead Belly. They frame the album perfectly; they are irreverent and playful without being disrespectful, or worse, ironic.

The album opens properly with "Gold Tooth Shine," which is the clear choice for a first single—well, they've released a video for it anyway; I don't think they do traditional singles—because aside from being a crapload of fun, it has a strong connection to their last album, and also showcases a lot of what's great about their new direction, like the killer dynamic between Jamie and Sarah K. on vocals, and a more full studio sound.

Most of Side A is original tracks, and make for a pretty good set of party tunes. There isn't a weak one in the bunch, but "Gotta Thing For You" is the stand-out cut of the side, deep and growly and right smack in that sweet groove where all good jump blues lives, with the hard-driving "Cinderblocks" not too far behind.

Side B is all covers but one, and contains my three favourite cuts, including "He'll Make A Way," which is probably the best thing on the whole album. It captures the band's versatility, lets everybody do their thing and shake loose a bit, but still digs way down deep to the emotional core of country blues. It's risky including a Robert Johnson cover on an album, because you're pretty much guaranteeing it will be the best song, unless of course you also include a Skip James cover, in which case even the Devil's own guitarist would have to settle for number two. But catl nails it, and makes it their own, which is in itself no mean feat.

"5 Miles," the lone original track on Side B, is notable for being the most foot-tapping, head-nodding song on the album, and I think it will also eventually be recognized as the the most memorable and fun of the uptempo numbers.

"Get Outta My Car," a Hasil Adkins cover, is emerging as the obvious critical favourite, in no small part because they handle it like old hands, but also I think because it was an obvious direction for the band to go in, and doesn't offer the same remarkable surprises as a cut like "Cocaine," a slow-burning number that sees Sarah K. taking the lead on vocals. It was one of the best creative decisions the band could have made. She'll never win American Idol, but that sort of voice would work against her; it would be too polished, too sterile and insincere. Instead she's gentle and raw by turns, strong but never soft, belting out God's own motherfucking Truth like a blues singer should.

I really didn't think that catl could put out a record better than With the Lord For Cowards You Will Find No Place, which remains one of the finest blues-punk albums I've heard, and one of the best new blues albums since the Black Keys' Chulahoma (an album made up entirely of Junior Kimbrough covers), but Soon This Will All Be Gone has more than lived up to that challenge.

Here is where I post links, so you can follow the band on Twitter and buy the album.

I mentioned in an earlier post that this year I'm going to make an effort to reacquaint myself with my nerdy roots, and true to my word I've already begun in earnest. I've finished the first book from my three-volume H.P. Lovecraft collection, three more Ian Rankin novels (a different kind of nerdy) and this morning while waiting for my alarm to sound, I polished off The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. "But wait," you say (don't argue, I heard you quite clearly), "the title of this post is Steampunk 101; that's pretty specifically nerdy." Well, yes it is. Allow me to explain.

Last year I reviewed two novels, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, by Adrienne Kress, and Triptych, by J.M. Frey (both of which were excellent), and I have—sort of, in a very limited way—started to get to know both authors online and that, in turn, got me interested in a corner of the nerdy world that I haven't paid much attention to: steampunk. (Because they are clearly interested and involved in it, and one of the best parts of getting to know new people is getting exposed to new things.) I've read a few steampunk novels before, which I'll get to in a minute, so I put the call out for a list of books that might qualify as a kind of "Steampunk 101" reading program. I put together a list based on the recommendations I got (here's a post on Kress' blog that was particularly helpful), which I will be adding to as I discover what it is about the subgenre I do and do not like. I'll get to the list, but first, let's talk about how I'm coming into it.

The first steampunk novel I read was William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 collaboration, The Difference Engine, the title apparently responsible for bringing popular attention to the subgenre. It's the closest thing Gibson has to a "difficult" book, and to be honest I found it a struggle to get acclimatized both times that I read it (the last being a good seven years ago), and I remember almost nothing specific about it, except that it took a long time to get going, and then became quite good. I'll probably read it again soon, if for no other reason than because I find it a bit ridiculous that I remember so little.

The other two that I've read are Gordon Dahlquist's The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and its first sequel, The Dark Volume. Dahlquist said (in an interview a few years ago with a Johnny Depp fansite, of all places) that he's working on a third book to round out the series, but given how enormous the advance was on the first two—two million dollars, according to Google—and how poorly they sold versus expectations, no third book appears to be forthcoming. The rumour mill seems to think that, essentially, because an acquisitions editor saw something good and went a little nuts with the advance, no one is going to touch book three. If that's true, and I want to emphasize the if, it's a crying shame, because Dahlquist's first two were fun as hell.

They follow a trio of protagonists, Miss Celeste Temple, Doctor Svenson, and Cardinal Chang, who on the surface could not be more different. Svenson is attached to a diplomatic mission, Miss Temple is a wealthy young woman (initially) in search of a respectably middle-class husband, and Cardinal Change (whose real name is never revealed; he's called Cardinal Chang because he wears red leather and has unusual scarring around his eyes), and unusually intelligent and skilled... well, I'm not sure what you'd call him; he's kind of a cross between a detective and an assassin. Imagine an even more violent, amoral Batman, but instead of living in a Twentieth Century mansion, he lives in one of Victorian London's rookeries.

Each chapter is from the (third person limited) point of view of one of the three protagonists, moves like a rocket, and then ends on a cliff-hanger, making them two of the most fast-paced books I've read in years, despite being 760 and 508 pages, respectively. Neither book pretends to be high art, but Dahlquist does an excellent job of not only giving each protagonist a unique voice, but an interesting and complex one—although as their interests converge and diverge, they do tend to work in unison a bit more than perhaps they should, becoming "the gang" a bit too easily.

But all that aside, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with power relationships in the two books, and not just as a natural consequence of having three protagonists from different social classes. The plot is built on cascading layers (is that right? Maybe cascading through layers?) of control, or efforts to manipulate relationships in order to gain, maintain, or exert power, from the halls of government, to personal relationships (especially, in some really fucked up ways, power over women, although Miss Temple manages to turn that on its head—she starts out as a Damsel in Distress, but one with considerable pluck, and by the end is a force to be reckoned with). There's a kind of Eyes Wide Shut element to a lot of what goes on (although it gets considerably weirder, and there is some seriously hand-waving to explain some of the "science" as science), and while the books can be smutty in a fun way at times, it can also get kind of dark, which I'm told is not entirely usual for steampunk. Which is sort of odd to me, given how conflicted the Victorians were about sex. On the public face of things they were every bit as uptight as the stereotypes would suggest, but they were also obsessed with brothels to a pretty much unprecedented degree, and had a thriving child prostitution industry. It's not that the Victorians were "okay" with child abuse, it's more that so long as a) the child was of sufficiently low station, and b) somebody got paid for the child's, uh, services, it wouldn't have even occurred to most of them to think of it as abuse. That's splitting hairs, I know, but the Victorians were almost schizophrenic in their attitudes about children, and those attitudes were as much wrapped up in their ideas about class as they were in their ideas about morality. (If you want to read a novel that addresses this particular brand of Victorian hypocrisy directly, I suggest John MacLachlan Gray's excellent White Stone Day—and my fellow Downton Abbey fans should recognize that not only is this the world that Robert Crawley grew up in, it's also the social order the Lady Dowager wants so desperately to preserve.) Anyway, Dahlquist's two novel are almost fever-inducingly good.

So having read all of that (and then Peter Ackroyd's amazing psychogeography / psychohistory London: The Biography, which I think is a must-read for anyone who wants to write or read about London; it will profoundly enrich your other reading experiences, among other things), and having solicited my recommendations, I started my Steampunk 101 project with The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. It's considered not only one of the foundational texts of the subgenre, but also one of the best. It's one of those protagonist-travels-in-to-another-realm/time fantasy novels, which, I have to tell you normally really fucking suck, I mean, hard. Think of The Fionavar Tapestry. It's a fish-out-of-water thing for sure, and it gives the reader somebody to connect with without a whole lot of work for the author (in fact the author would have to work pretty hard to screw that up) but it can also be used to give a character expert-level status they wouldn't normally possess, and otherwise Mary Sue the hell out of them (once again, see The Fionavar Tapestry for the mother of all examples). Before we go any further, I'm going to say that The Anubis Gates is the exception to the sucking thing. Oh yes, and you would not believe my surprise to find out that it was a fantasy novel, and not science fiction, as it was my understanding that steampunk was explicitly a cyberpunk offshoot, so I was expecting closely observed cultural details with particular focus on how technology fits into that whole mess. There was all sorts of cultural grime in the corners of the novel, but instead of technology, there was magic. Magic! Blew my goddamn mind. And now, as I look over my list, I see things like zombies. Well, okay.

The Anubis Gates wound up being a great deal of fun once you get past the sluggish, overblown prose of the first fifty pages (it was intended to be a dark and exciting opening, but it didn't quite work), and Powers did a remarkably good job interweaving non-heroic (or non-mythmaking, if you prefer) versions of several Romantic poets into a time-traveling adventure with some genuine swash-buckling. Powers does an interesting thing with a fictional poet named William Ashbless (who is in reality the consciousness of Brendan Doyle, our protagonist from 1983, trapped in the body of a guy named Brennan, also from the future), a character who also appears in a novel by James P. Blaylock, and publishes poems that have no author. Ancient Egyptian magic, gypsies, psychotic clowns, time-traveling academics, magical clones and a body-jumping magician who sprouts an insane amount of hair; how could you possibly resist?

Anyway, as my first foray into a serious introduction to steampunk was pretty successful, here's my list, which I expect to get longer, in no particular order (most of it comes from J.M. Frey and Adrienne Kress, but I also did some independent research):

• Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest (Dreadnought was the original recommendation, but Boneshaker is apparently the first in a loosely-connected set of a novels, and I like to read things in order)
• Mainspring, by Jay Lake
• Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld
• Soulless, by Gail Carriger
• The Drawing of the Dark, by Tim Powers

So last night's post about the blues was sort of accidental. I had intended to write about what I listen to when I read. For years I was the sort of person who could read anywhere, regardless of what was going on around me. In university, when reading suddenly became important to my future (in terms of my career, I mean; I'm a book critic—as in, reviewer—now, but I once wanted to teach university-level English Literature and work as an academic critic/theorist), I lost the ability to read in the same room as someone watching television. And then I couldn't read while listening to music with lyrics. And then I couldn't read while listening to any sort of music.

Most of that has passed, and I can once again listen to music while I read, although anything too heavy or uptempo, or with complicated lyrics I like to get lost in, is still a no-go. It's as though they occupy the same space in my brain as whatever it is I'm reading.

But anyway, I thought I'd give you a brief list of some albums I like to listen to when I read (my total "Reading" playlist is 1,983 songs, or approximately 6 days of continuous listening, so I won't be including it all), and if you like you can make suggestions for your own additions in the comments.

• Various Artists - In the Mood For Love Soundtrack
• Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - What Is Free to a Good Home?
• Alpha - Pepper
• Various Artists - Cinematic: Classic Film Music Remixed
• Cliff Martinez - Solaris Soundtrack
• Kronos Quartet - Pieces of Africa
• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
• Alexandre Desplat - Birth Soundtrack
• Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
• Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolf
• Esthero - We R In Need Of A Musical Revolution
• Headless Heroes - The Silence of Love
• José González - In Our Nature
• Barbara Morgenstern - Nichts Muss
• Masha Qrella - Unsolved Remains
• Massive Attack - Mezzanine
• Shugo Tokumaru - Night Piece
• Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul
• True Widow - True Widow
• Warpaint - Exquisite Corpse
• The London Haydn Quartet - Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 20
• Auryn Quartet - String Quartets Op. 76, nos. 1 - 6 (Haydn)
• Hesperion XXI cond. Jordi Savall - Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805): Fandango, Sinfonie & Musica Notturna di Madrid
• Various Artists - Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World Soundtrack
• Vangelis - Blade Runner Soundtrack (Extended Bootleg Version)

Again, I'd love to hear your recommendations in the comments.

It's no secret that I'm a huge blues fan. An argument could be made that the blues, as a genre, is at the core of all modern Western popular music, from jazz, rock 'n' roll, and country, right up to dubstep and digital hardcore. But that's not why I love it. There are so many things about it that appeal to me it's hard to know where to start. It's a music that has remained vital, emotionally and spiritually, for more than a century, maintaining both a strong connection to its roots and originating forms, and at the same time embracing new styles and techniques. Charlie Patton, who died in 1934 somewhere in his forties (nobody knows for sure how old he was), could rise from the dead and would be able to hear catl or The Black Keys and not only understand their music, but recognize it as his own.

The prevailing stereotype, which derives largely from '60s revivalist fans, is that it is a music of hardship and despair, sounding all too often like a cheap knockoff of Muddy Waters' spectacular "Mannish Boy" (a song full of raw sexual energy and the irony of a grown man gently mocking the näiveté of his younger, more cocksure self, and an answer song to Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man," itself written in response to Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man"). These stereotypes certainly ring true in particular corners of the blues world, but only if one listens uncritically.

The blues is also a music of spiritual revelation, of race and class struggles, of love and sex and a whisky-throated howl from the back of a juke-joint on a hot Saturday night. It is also a music of honesty and reflection. Rock 'n' roll, the most famous of the blues' bastard-children (and really, originally just a name made up to trick white people into buying R&B records), is about ego. Rock 'n' roll cries out, look how great I am, and says I love you because you are beautiful, because you're perfect, and sometimes, I can't believe you would hurt me. The blues won't tell you these lies. The blues understands atonement. For every blues song saying you've done me wrong, there is one that says I know that I've done wrong. It asks for forgiveness, knowing it doesn't deserve any. The blues says you aren't that pretty, but neither am I; you can be spiteful and I can be cruel, but I love you anyway, and I'm asking you to love me too. The blues knows you aren't perfect, and it doesn't give a shit, as long as you tell the truth, even when it's hard. Maybe especially when it's hard. The blues is honest, and it's raw.

If you know the blues mostly from artists like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, then I'm about to blow your mind. They are great performers, well-liked and respected for good reason. But they are slick and polished in a way that I think doesn't reflect the core of the genre, or the power it can really have. Last year a friend of mine asked me to put together a small sampler of blues songs, to give her a sense of the genre. I wound up making a five-disc, one hundred song collection, mostly of country blues (but also some proto-blues, blues-punk, and even rock 'n' roll), that I think is a good introduction to what the blues can really be. That shows its raw side, its love of strong drink and causing trouble and licking sweat from its partner's neck. I called it Drinking, Fighting, and Fucking: Lessons in the Real Folk Blues. I can't distribute it here, because that would be illegal, but I'm going to give you the playlist, so you can assemble it yourself.

This is important music, and I hope you'll seek it out.

Disc One

1. Rosie - C.B. And Axe Gang
2. Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues - Skip James
3. Ain't Gonna Study War No More - Lead Belly
4. Evil Blues - Mance Lipscomb
5. Down The Dirt Road Blues - Charlie Patton
6. Dry Land Blues - Furry Lewis & Frank Stokes
7. Stop Breakin' Down Blues - Robert Johnson
8. Shake 'Em On Down - Bukka White
9. Three Women Blues - Blind Willie McTell
10. Catfish Blues - Jack Owens & Bud Spires
11. I Got Mine - Furry Lewis & Frank Stokes
12. The Panama Limited - Bukka White
13. When I Lay My Burden Down - Mississippi Fred McDowell
14. C & A Blues - Big Bill Broonzy
15. It Hurts Me Too - Tampa Red
16. Drop Down Mama - Sleepy John Estes
17. I'm A Steady Rollin' Man - Robert Johnson
18. When Can I Change My Clothes? - Bukka White
19. Motherless Children - Felix Dukes, Mississippi Fred McDowell
20. Furry's Blues - Furry Lewis & Frank Stokes
21. Cross Cut Saw Blues - Tony Hollins
22. Working Man Blues - Sleepy John Estes
23. You Can't Get Stuff No More - Blind Willie McTell
24. I Am In The Heavenly Way - Bukka White
25. Me And The Devil Blues - Robert Johson
26. Midnight Special - Lead Belly

Disc Two

1. Jesus on the Mainline - Jame Shorty, Viola James & church congregation
2. Baby, Please Don't Go - Mississippi Fred McDowell
3. A to Z Blues - Blind Willie McTell
4. The Atlanta Special - Bukka White
5. Sweet Blood Call - Louisiana Red
6. Suffer - Jimmy McCracklin
7. Catfish Blues - R.L. Burnside
8. I Love You (Solo) - Asie Payton
9. Motherless Children Have A Hard Time - Blind Willie McTell
10. Goin' Down to the River - Mississippi Fred McDowell, Fanny Davis & Miles Pratcher
11. Down in the Alley - Big Bill Broonzy
12. Sissy Man - Josh White (As Pinewood Tom)
13. Shake 'Em On Down - Mississippi Fred McDowell
14. Boogie Chillen - John Lee Hooker
15. Hoochie Coochie Man - Muddy Waters
16. Mama Talk To Your Daughter - J.B. Lenoir
17. Messin' With the Kid - Earl Hooker & Junior Wells
18. Big Boss Man - Jimmy Reed
19. Killing Floor - Howlin' Wolf
20. Dust My Broom - Elmore James
21. Bring It To Jerome - Bo Diddley
22. Prison Bars All Around Me - Earl Hooker & Junior Wells
23. Mannish Boy - Muddy Waters

Disc Three

1. Nobody's Fault But Mine - Mance Lipscomb
2. Black Mattie - Robert Belfour
3. Standing in My Doorway Crying - Jessie Mae Hemphill
4. Peaches - R.L. Burnside
5. It Must Have Been the Devil - Jack Owens and Bud Spires
6. You Got to Move - Mississippi Fred McDowell
7. Please Tell Me You Love Me - Asie Payton
8. If You Like Fat Women - CeDell Davis
9. You Better Run - Junior Kimbrough & The Soul Blues Boys
10. I Found Out - Nathaniel Mayer
11. Jumper Hangin' on the Line - R.L. Burnside
12. She Asked Me So I Told Her - T-Model Ford
13. Done Got Old - Heartless Bastards
14. Teardrop - Magic Slim
15. I Got My Eyes On You - Robert Belfour
16. Have Mercy on Me - The Black Keys
17. Burning Hell - Canned Heat & John Lee Hooker

Disc Four

1. Back to the Bridge - Asie Payton
2. Keep Your Hands Off Her - Junior Kimbrough
3. Bad Luck City - R.L. Burnside
4. When The Lights Go Out - The Black Keys
5. Breaking My Heart - Robert Belfour
6. Feel Good Babe - Frank Frost
7. Pucker Up Buttercup - Paul Jones
8. Sail On - T-Model Ford
9. Boogie Chillen No. 2 - Canned Heat & John Lee Hooker
10. Modern Times - The Black Keys
11. Ride Like Hell - Big Sugar
12. Grind It Down - catl
13. Chicken Dog - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
14. Devil is on His Way - Joe Buck Yourself
15. The Criminal Inside Me - R.L. Burnside
16. Workin' Man's Soul - catl

Disc Five

1. Travelling Riverside Blues - Led Zeppelin
2. Memo From Turner - The Rolling Stones
3. Shake It Baby - John Lee Hooker
4. Boom Boom - The Animals
5. Groundhog Day - Big Sugar
6. Ole Man Trouble - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
7. Happy Wanderer - Chad Parks and The Near Death Experience
8. I Got Mine - The Black Keys
9. Skull Ring - Big Sugar
10. The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair - Led Zeppelin
11. Oh Death - catl
12. Blues X Man - The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
13. Over the Hill - R.L. Burnside
14. Norene - Robert Belfour
15. Why Don't You Give It To Me - Nathaniel Mayer
16. Empty Head - Big Sugar
17. My Mind Is Ramblin' - The Black Keys
18. Hard Time Killing Floor Blues - Chris Thomas King

I've been reading The Children's Book recently, and came across a passage that struck me as important. If you want to understand A.S. Byatt's work, not the whole of it, of course (post title notwithstanding), but the catalyst, the detonator, the idea that acts as the prime mover, you'd do well to think very hard about this passage.

All you need to know in advance is that the book takes place in early Edwardian England, and that Patty Dace, Arthur Dobbin, and Rev. Frank Mallett have decide to organize a lecture series, and are meeting to discuss the topic and potential lecturers.

She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps find a title for a series. Dobbin said he thought they should find exciting speakers first, and then make up a title. Although Dobbin had been shy and ill-at-ease at Todefright he felt in retrospect that he had been privileged and delighted to meet the glittering folk in their fancy dress. He wanted to hear them again — Humphry and Olive, Toby Youlgreave and August Steyning, the anarchists and the London professor who worked with Professor Galton on human statistics and heredity. He said that he had heard some very interesting ideas about folklore and ancient customs whilst in Andreden. Maybe she could think of those.

Miss Dace said she was interested more in change. She wanted lectures on new things, the New Life, the New Woman, new forms of art and democracy. And religion, she said, looking bravely at Frank.

Frank sipped his tea and said thoughtfully that in fact there was only an apparent contradiction. For many of the new things looked back to very old things for their strength. The theosophists looked back to the wisdom of Tibetan masters, for instance. William Morris's socialism looked back to mediaeval guilds and communities. Edward Carpenter's ideas about shedding the stultifying respectability of Victorian family life looked back also, to human beings living in harmony with nature, as natural creatures. And the same was true of the vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists, they required a wholesome respect for natural animal life, as it was before technical civilisation. In the arts too, Benedict Fludd, for instance, wanted to return to the ancient craft of the single potter, and to find the lost red glazes, the Turkish Iznik, the Chinese sang-de-boeuf. The Society for Psychical Research had rediscovered an old spirit world, and lost primitive powers of human communication. Old superstitions might furnish new spiritual understanding. Even the New Woman, he said, venturing a half-joke, sought freedom from whalebone and laces in Rational Dress but also in free-flowing mediaeval gowns. Women's work in the world appeared to be new, but in the old times abbesses had wielded power and governed communities, as principals of colleges now did. Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past. He would almost dare to propose himself as a lecturer on this theme.

I'm a newcomer to the CBS legal drama The Good Wife, now in its third season. I've spent the last day and a half watching the first season from my sick bed. It was a combination of things that made me finally give in, despite the fact that a new network legal drama wasn't particularly high up on my priorities. People whose opinions I respect say good things about the show, and then I saw some really great things said about it on PBS's excellent recent documentary, America in Prime Time, so here we are. The premise is simple: Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) has to return to the law in order to support her family after her philandering husband, Peter (played by Law & Order veteran Chris Noth), an Illinois state's attorney, is disbarred and jailed for a sex/corruption scandal. Structurally, the show is divided into two slightly overlapping major elements. First, the main plot, which follows Alicia Florrick as she tries to balance the aftermath of a very public humiliation with the workload of being a junior associate and being a single mother of two, and second, the Case of the Week format common to nearly every courtroom drama ever to grace American television.

The cast is very strong. Julianna Margulies gives a surprisingly subtle performance that's more about cumulative effects than individual scenes. She's best with small expressions in scenes with a sense of stillness, but she also manages to go between genuinely tender and brutally cold without appearing inconsistent or in any way out of character. I haven't seen a lot of her work, but this is the best performance she's given of those I have seen.

Chris Noth doesn't have a lot to do, and Josh Charles (as Will Gardner, one of the named partners at Alicia's firm) plays a variation of the same character he's done in everything since Sports Night. It's not a bad character, but it would be nice to see something new from him. Christine Baranski's portrayal of Diane Lockhart (another of the named partners) is exceptional, in part because despite being cast as a rich, powerful woman (a common role for her), she easily sidesteps any potential accusations of typecasting by giving a really warm performance, one that's strikingly different from the borderline parodic ones she's given in comedic versions of that role in the past. Relative newcomer Archie Panjabi (who I know best as Maya from the original UK series Life on Mars) is also great as investigator Kalinda Sharma. She is particularly excellent at keeping a subplot about the question of her sexuality from overwhelming her character. The part is written very well, but an actress not on her game could easily wind up wielding that aspect of the character like a cudgel, which would be the absolute wrong way to play her. Alan Cumming is just Alan Cumming with the volume turned down a bit, and it works fine.

The show also uses an excellent array of quality character actors, people like David Paymer, Michael Boatman, Peter Riegert, Peter Gerety (who most will know from The Wire, but I liked him better in Homicide: Life on the Street), and personal favourites Joe Morton, Carrie Preston, Amy Acker, and Martha Plimpton (and of course Gillian Jacobs makes an appearance in the pilot).

The ongoing plot about Alicia, her career, and her husband that makes up half the structure of the show, is unique and exceptional, focusing not, as one might expect, on the political ups and downs of the prominent public figure Peter Florrick (you can catch Kelsey Grammar in the new series Boss if you want that), but on her balancing act. One could also argue that it's a show about balancing private and public spaces, but those spaces commingle significantly after Peter is released from prison, and we are offered glimpses of his life and career through cracks in the door and shots over the shoulder. The information accumulates over the course of the season, and what happened to Peter and how he's responding gradually becomes clear, but we still see it primarily through how people treat Alicia on the job. It almost seems like the early episodes can't seem to decide whether or not they're actually about Alicia, or if they're just about Peter as seen through Alicia's life, like drawing a figure by filling in the negative space. I say almost, because the writers use it as a way to push her towards establishing her own agency, and by the end of the season, The Good Wife is unquestionably about Alicia, almost as though it took twenty-three episodes for the writers to convince both the audience and Alicia herself that the show really should be about her.

If I were to have any complaints about the main plotline, it's with some of the children. Zach Florrick's unusual technical prowess is a little too much like "kids these days" hand-waving, while his girlfriend Becca's (not unrealistic) aggressive sexuality just seems like one plot point too many.

The Case of the Week element of the show is a bit more problematic. On the one hand it's the primary vehicle by which Alicia establishes her new sense of self (and how they sneak in all those great supporting actors), but there's nothing new there in terms of a network legal drama. I've seen these cases before, I've seen the legal trickery and the research and the late nights with empty pizza boxes and those cool folded cardboard cartons of Chinese food that you never see in the real world. I've seen the awkward opening statements and the love/hate relationships between opposing counsel. I have seen it all a million times before, and it's not even self-aware about it like Boston Legal (an unbelievably brilliant show, despite its problems). Eventually one case began to blur into another, and they started to lose their sense of urgency. I can't help but wonder if they were only included at the network's request.

Since my case of the plague (or rather this nasty head cold) doesn't show any signs of abating, I'll probably move on to the opening episodes of season two tomorrow. It is my hope that the main plotline will continue to be strong, and the kinks in the Case of the Week format will iron themselves out.

I don't do resolutions. Not because it's a cliché; I sometimes think those are all right. Rather it's because I just don't ever stick to them. Things happen, blah blah blah. I could give you excuses, but that's how things wind up going. So, inspired by Adrienne's post (and obviously aping her post title) I'm going to say a few words about what I hope the new year has in store.

First of all, I'm going to get a new job. This really isn't optional, since I've just been freelancing since August (and I'm definitely going to be doing more of that; I've already been doing some freelance editing this year, and I've been back from the holidays for less than a week), but at this point anyway, it's not paying the bills. I'm trying to keep optimistic, but this is honestly going to be simultaneously the hardest and the most important part of my new year, both in terms of the task itself, and keeping my spirits up.

I want to read more poetry. And I've already started! I'm nearly seventy pages into Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems. I've said for a long time that he's my favourite poet, but I'm not sure if that's necessarily the case. I really admire his work, and "The Idea of Order at Key West" is my favourite poem of all time, but maybe that's not enough. I'm going to start with books of poetry already in my collection (the Stevens is a textbook left over from a Modern American Literature course I took with Stan Fogel as an undergrad), which means poets like Anne Sexton, E.E. Cummings, Anne Carson, Don McKay, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, David Donnell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a bunch of others who show up in various anthologies. I admire poetry as a form, but I don't feel like I understand it very well, particularly contemporary poetry, and I find that I either connect instantly and profoundly with a poem, or it bores me and I want to move on. I don't know if this is normal, but it's starting to bother me, and I want to work on it this year.

I want to start writing and blogging more, particularly about television. I've said things like this before, and it would be easy to say "and this time, I really mean it," but I've been a serious fan of television as a medium my whole life, and at this point I think I have a strong enough grasp of what's going on and the necessary critical language to write about it seriously. It would be nice if I could get paid for it, but I've come to realize that if I've got something to say I should just say it regardless. I plan to start with a series of posts about the amazing sitcom Community—and before you say anything, I've already got drafts started. As for blogging about other things, I also have drafts of book reviews and other posts, I just need to finish them. To be honest, the biggest obstacle is the stress of looking for work; it's difficult to concentrate on the writing I do for myself with that looming over my head. (I would also like to say that 2012 is the year I stop making excuses, but really, nobody keeps that resolution.)

This will surprise no one who knows me well, but I'm kind of a geek. I like Star Trek and Star Wars, video games, science fiction novels, anime, and roleplaying games (well, some). I own complete runs of Cerebus, Preacher, and The Sandman (or did before some folks borrowed some of the latter without returning them). Hell, I even got about a third of the way into writing my own tabletop RPG once. Yeah, that's right, I'm that guy. But over the years I've drifted away from those roots. I don't read as much SF/F as I used to, I haven't played an RPG in years, and I can't even remember the last time I watched a new anime series. The truth is, the deeper I got into "fandom," the more I found two equal but opposite impulses within the community extremely unappealing. The first was the impulse from some in the community to relentlessly nitpick every trivial little thing that was even a tiny bit inconsistent or outside their expectations—which goes beyond criticism and into entitlement—and the second was the impulse some have to go easy on people working in genre because it's been ghettoized for so long and "we're all in this together" (or some other sentimental nonsense the critic in me can't abide), which helps no one, as it gives us a false sense of the work. Anyway, neither of those impulses are representative of the fan community as a whole (and it's more a collection of related communities than a unified entity anyway), but they made me not want to be a part of it all the same. I got into James Joyce and art films, A.S. Byatt and The Wire, and for a long time didn't look back.

The thing is, you can't read a lot of contemporary literary fiction, or watch a lot of television and film—not even the art house versions of same—without seeing how they have been influenced by and intersect with what we talk about as genre work. I'm not ashamed of being a big nerdy goof. Long time readers will know that I've blogged extensively about William Gibson's books, for example, plus reviewed his last two for Quill & Quire, and even interviewed him for Canadian Notes & Queries; additionally most of my professional book reviews have been of books that straddle the line between genre work and "capital L" literature. But I never felt a kinship with the community, and drifted away in favour of other priorities. This year I want to change that. I spent most of December reading Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and now I've moved on to H.P. Lovecraft. I've also, almost clandestinely it feels like, been reading Raymond Chandler, Ian Rankin, Stieg Larsson, Elmore Leonard, Fred Vargas, Michael Dibdin, David Montrose, P.D. James, James M. Cain, and so on, and enjoyed pretty much all of them unequivocally. So I'm going to read a lot more genre fiction this year, and even try and see if I can connect a little with the community. We'll see how it goes. I may even write about some of it.

So that's a lot of rambling nonsense, but those are things that I hope will happen in the coming new year. As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Please note that this review may include spoilers. As a general rule I do not share the SF/F community's aversion to that sort of thing (it quite frankly gets in the way of a critic being able to give a full and honest assessment), so I'm not going to be careful about it. This is your one and only warning.

If you're into media—any kind of media, be it books, music, film, whatever—there is a term you will eventually hear thrown around: crossover success. A crossover success is when a work or artist from one genre, say, a rapper, achieves success with the fans of another genre, like indie rockers, or even better, with mainstream audiences. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are massive examples from the book world. Before King, horror had largely been relegated to the third tier of the genre fiction ghetto (although to be fair, aside from the big names it still sort of is), and Rowling probably did more to mainstream fantasy and kid-lit than anyone since C.S. Lewis. Most crossover successes are not that big, but they are pretty special things.

So with that in mind, I'm going to tell you two true things about Triptych. The first and most important thing is that it's a wonderful, complex novel in the traditions of Ursula K. Le Guin and Phyllis Gotlieb (the latter in kind of an oblique way), and it absolutely deserves considerable crossover success. The second thing is that it won't get it, and for the most ridiculous of reasons. It's not that the book deals frankly with difficult questions of sexuality to a degree that has the potential to shake-up mainstream audiences, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that. No, it's because it suffers from Porcupine's Quill Syndrome. You see, the Porcupine's Quill is a really amazing Canadian literary press (not Triptych's publisher, but they are notorious for this, so bear with me). They publish excellent books that deserve critical praise and popular attention, and they put them in the most off-putting, god-awful ugly, embarrassed-to-be-seen-on-the-subway-with-it covers you could possibly imagine. And Dragon Moon Press, who have clearly shown themselves to be excellent judges of what should go between those covers (by virtue of having published something as good as Triptych in the first place), have saddled Frey's book with a cover that conforms to just about everything mainstream audiences hate about SF book covers, implying so many of the stereotypes that make them think they don't like genre fiction in the first place that I can guarantee it will be enough to keep them away (because I have ignored books for the exact same reason, and I am a lot more SF-friendly than a great many of my mainstream literary-minded friends). As harsh as that sounds, I believe it to be the absolute truth. I encourage you to not be that person, because the book I'm about to tell you about deserves your attention.

Triptych takes its name from the relationship between the three main characters: Specialist Gwen Pierson, her partner Doctor Basil Grey, and Kalp, the alien who becomes the third in their aglunate (perhaps taken from agglutination, a term from biology that refers to a clump of cells usually bound together by a different kind of cell, its root being the Latin word for "glue"), which has its closest human analogue in the polygamous marriage, and is the primary social unit for Kalp's species. The book also has a three part structure, each (more or less) focusing on one of the main characters, with Kalp's being both the longest and the most engaging.

As is natural with stories involving time travel, events in Triptych don't always happen in the right order. It opens with Kalp's death, immediate and visceral. Frey does an excellent job of making the reader feel Basil's pain and shock at seeing Kalp killed in front of him, no easy feat given at that point we don't know—and therefore have no reason to care about—any of the characters. We then move almost immediately, via time machine, to Gwen's early childhood where she and Basil stop a murder and try to perform some emotional triage. At this point Triptych looks like it's being set up to be a thriller—an unusually emotionally aware thriller, but still. And then we get to Kalp.

The middle section of the book sees Kalp become the (third person limited) point of view character and Triptych suddenly stops resembling a thriller. Kalp and his people arrived on Earth as refugees, after their own planet was destroyed. Frey takes us through Kalp's culture shock expertly, using the alienness of his species' biology (which is where I see the Gotlieb)—particularly his unusual aural-sensitivity and a facial structure that makes recognizing and reproducing human visual cues difficult—to emphasize how similar, how recognizably human and familiar his situation is and what it does to him emotionally. Frey makes it impossible for the reader not to connect with Kalp, handily disproving all the stereotypes about SF being unable to do anything sophisticated with character. Even after opening with such a heavy emphasis on the thriller elements, Triptych is fundamentally about character. I wanted to spend a lot more time with Kalp, and it was genuinely heartbreaking when I came to his death the second time. Frey handles the thriller/time travel elements of the novel well, but her character work is so good I think that if she wanted to she could deliver an exceptional SF novel (or a novel in any genre she chooses, really) built on character alone.

Of course the aglunate and accompanying issues of sexuality are absolutely central to Triptych. Gwen and Basil are already partners when Kalp comes into their lives, and Frey is very delicate about how she works his curiosity and cultural norms into their world, until it becomes a natural part of that relationship. And for the most part it works. I say "for the most part," because it sometimes seems a little too smooth. Accepting sexuality as a spectrum, and polygamous (or other) relationships as being as valid as, and equal to, straight monogamous relationships doesn't necessarily move one's position on that spectrum, even though Frey is perfectly right about the pressures unexamined social structures put on how we see love. Gwen and Basil go through all the expected turmoil as they think about their position on that spectrum for perhaps the first time in their lives, realigning their expectations for themselves and their lives, but it sometimes seems too compressed a time frame, especially given how traumatized Gwen initially seems when Kalp makes his first timid, confused advances. Likewise with the speed that Kalp's people are accepted by governments and integrated into society; it seems overly optimistic to me (not because of his peoples' sexuality, but simply because paranoia and xenophobia seem like the default positions on the best of days, though they do get their fair share of bigots doing what bigots always do). The sex scenes themselves are very well done, though at times unsettling (if only because they are a bit outside my wheelhouse, as I kept picturing Kalp as a large blue cat or wolf with certain humanoid features, and that put him into uncanny valley territory, a combination that hits my creepiness button a little).

The thriller plot wraps up cleanly, although not as cleanly as it could have, which leads me to my only other issue with Triptych. For the most part, Frey's prose is quite good, and it is especially good when she's writing about Kalp. His voice (well, by proxy anyway) comes through with considerable sharpness and individuality. But when she's more focused on Gwen and Basil, specifically when writing about the violence that frames the story of their relationship, she is not always at her best. In the early days, pulp SF/F (I'm currently reading Robert E. Howard's Conan stories from the '30s, but I have read quite extensively in early SF as well) leaned very heavily on modifiers to define its "style"—by which I mean using lots of adverbs and adjectives—and they still seem to show up in the prose of SF/F writers whose style otherwise eschews them, in the same way that detective novels still sometimes sprout overly-clever metaphors more than seventy years after Raymond Chandler published The Big Sleep, as if those things manifest on their own, a feature of the genre that asserts itself independent of the individual writer's will. Using three modifiers when one—or none—would do the job better just seems to be one of those things for SF/F writers. I find that when I encounter it I spend so much energy trying to parse how they all fit together that I can't always keep track of what's going on, and that happened to me one or two times at the beginning and end of Triptych, in particular during scenes of violence.

These are minor quibbles, though, and Triptych is definitely one of the strongest books I've read this year, and certainly one of the strongest SF novels I've read in quite some time. If there's an SF fan on your Christmas list, or even someone who isn't generally an SF fan but loves strong characters, Triptych would make them an excellent gift. While you're at it, pick one up for yourself.